March 31, 2014 |
“What a drag it is getting old” – Mick Jagger, Mother’s Little Helper
“You’ll look funny when you’re 50” – Chas (James Fox) to Turner (Mick Jagger) in Performance
We live in a time when youth is glorified and maturity is mocked. This is a rather new state of affairs and the reasons for it complicated, but it explains the pandemic of “mutton dressed as lamb”, the culture-wide impersonation of youth. And so no one who can possibly avoid it looks anything like our old notion of old.
They have plastic surgery and injection procedures, they dye their hair or, if bald, have new hair installed. They work out – yoga, Pilates, Spinning, even Zumba for gods’ sake, that voodoo dance performed by menopausal women to feign nubility. They dress in the latest fashions, those expensive items modelled in the magazines by teens. They listen to hip-hop. They pop pills to get themselves horny and hard (or wet). If they can afford it, they trade their spouses for a later model, just as they would an automobile.
The systematic glorification of youth and denigration of age probably began in the early 20th century. In his 1932 book The Doom of Youth, Wyndham Lewis pointed out that this seemingly spontaneous movement latterly referred to as “the generation gap” was in fact an economic strategy foisted on society by propagandists who were anything but young. The Baby Boomers, who are now reaching retirement age, were, in their youth, told, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Hopefully they retained this advice throughout their lives and so avoided having their pension funds evaporated by banking and stock-market shenanigans like the dotcom bubble and subprime mortgages. As it is, retirees are the new class of minimum-wage workers, competing with their grandchildren for fast-food jobs.
The principal advantage of youth is its cheapness and its physical strength and endurance. Older members of the labouring class are more expensive because they have received decades of increases based on experience and the economic realities of having a family. Yet at the same time they are less vigorous, being a bit worn out, and more likely to call in sick or wind up on disability.
Today, of course, the pensions and benefits that were hard fought for in the past century (not to mention unemployment and welfare, or “the dole”) are characterised as “entitlements”, while the word entitlement carries the connotation of dependency. Being accused of having “a sense of entitlement” is tantamount to being called a parasite. But if corporations can keep their workforces young, it will be inexpensive enough that they may not have to shift those jobs to the Third World. Yes, it is a drag getting old. And if, on honest inspection, one finds himself feeling or, more importantly, looking old, well, it may be time to start smoking crack and skydiving or racing motorcycles. You know what they say – “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.”
I got my first white hair in my early thirties. Oddly, it started on the top of my head, with a patch the size of a penny, around the spot acupuncturists call “the governing vessel”. According to Chinese medicine this is the meeting point of all the body’s yang energy. Yang is energetic, expansive and hot and a Chinese astrologer once told me not to wear red because I was already very hot, so maybe my chi burned that white spot into my scalp, sizzling the melanin right out of my hair.
In a few years I was getting a bit salt and peppery elsewhere. I had long hair at the time and a woman friend of mine said one day, “You look much too young to have grey hair, you should dye it.” This never occurred to me, but I was single and vanity won out. Why not? Since the white hairs were just a few at that point, I went with the advice and restored my locks to their original shade with Clairol Nice ’n Easy. Natural Medium Brown. I wasn’t going to fool around with Just For Men. Hair is hair. It just goes to show you what dopes men are that they buy hair dye for men. They might as well market “hair dye for heteros”.
Anyway, nobody noticed the adjustment in my hair. Then, maybe six months later, when my local beauty-supply spot was out of Natural Medium Brown, I grabbed the next shade up the spectrum, Natural Dark Caramel Brown. It looked a little different, but I didn’t think anything of it until I showed up at an office where I spent a lot of time as a creative director and all of the women in the office simultaneously burst into laughter. I was busted. I can still hear that chorus of derision: “Hahahahahahaha!” That was the end of the hair dye.
When it comes to hair colour, like Jim Morrison said, “The men don’t know, but the little girls understand.” A 2008 survey showed that 75% of American women colour their hair, compared with 7% in 1950. If anything, dye is trending upwards – The Huffington Post reported that, in some regions, 95% of women colour their hair. Many of them say they do it because of ageism in the workplace.
Men are following women’s lead. A survey said that men dyeing their hair increased from 2% in 1999 to 7% in 2010. One reason for this is that men are scared of looking old at the office. Corporations are no longer ruled by snowy-haired dons with watch chains on their waistcoats. The new long-haired CEO of T-Mobile wears a pink T-shirt, a rock’n’roll leather jacket and a shark’s tooth necklace. Another reason, of course, is that no respectable girl his son’s age is going to become the trophy wife of an old codger unless he’s a billionaire near death’s door.
Ah, but time is inexorable. And the older you get, the weirder the jet-black hair looks. (Not to mention the skinny jeans and perky tits.) There is still something to be said for naturalism. And I will admit that I get a lot of compliments on my grey-white full head of hair. I have also not had any surgical adjustments, although I was amused to find myself on a celebrity plastic-surgery blog, where readers speculate on who has had what done. Hey, it’s my bones, bitches! But my wife has been at me for years to get a neck lift because of a slight droop. She claims Bob Dylan had it done. You know, the guy who sang Forever Young. “Okay, honey, I’ll think about it.”
I am not against plastic surgery or injections per se, but there seems to be something inherent in the culture of cosmetic procedure that disables a person’s ability to see themselves accurately in the mirror. I guess it’s only the bad jobs that stand out, but boy do they stand out.
Anyway, I think the tide is turning. I think that showing some patina is coming into fashion. I now see grey-haired men on the cover of GQ. Are they imitating me? Well, that’s okay, I don’t mind. Because when I see those old geezers without a white hair on their heads, my heart goes out to them. They are stuck with dyeing. How do you transition out of it?
One of the sillier products are those that tell men that they can get rid of that grey gradually and no one will notice. Just put this foam on in the shower. Just drag this comb that looks like it’s been dipped in shoe polish through your hair every day. Who’ll remember that you were once grey?
My only problem with my hair going white had to do with photographs. The guy with the white hair and fair skin tends to disappear. I will admit that I attempted to deal with this problem for a while by having a little dark painted on to the snowy mop, especially around the face. It sort of worked, but on the other hand it was very difficult to pull it off naturalistically, to get that real salt and pepper thing right. And then just like I got busted dyeing, I got busted painting. My wife touched up my hair and it didn’t look right. Maybe she was mad at me. So I decided I’d go get a really short haircut. I did and not only did it not look better, it looked far worse. It looked like a graffiti artist had tagged my head with a magic marker.
There was only one thing to do. Bleach! I had a salon (a men’s salon, complete with bar and pool table) bleach it. I came out a blond. I tried to tell myself that I looked like Robert Shaw as Grant, the SPECTRE assassin in From Russia with Love, but I still felt funny. I never put any colour anywhere near my hair again. But I’m still carrying around a passport where I look surprisingly like Jean-Paul Gaultier.
Maybe Andy Warhol had the right idea. He was going bald in his early twenties, so he began to wear wig. Originally it was blond, but he began shifting to silver around the time that he was working in the silver factory, where everything was silver. When I went to work for him he was 42 and wearing a wig that was silver in front and black in the back. I thought he was old but cute. I think the wigs gave him a kind of gravitas, but ironically the contrast between the hair colour and the face made him seem oddly youthful. Like he was wearing an old-man costume. But then, when he hit his fifties, he started hanging out with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf and the wigs became crazier. They were still silver, but looked almost like the hairs were standing on end from electricity. The fake hair had become a real aura.
Andy, of course, knew that he wouldn’t disappear in photos if he had on his shades. Shades, hats, and dark eyebrows all pull you back into the photo, but the real secret of remaining visible with white hair is exemplified by Giorgio Armani. Always be tan.
That’s my strategy for immortal good looks: physical fitness with all-natural hair, white beard, and a good tan whenever possible. I wear the beard in honour of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), the author who concluded The Doom of Youth thus: “I prophesy that two centuries hence a long and sweeping snow-white beard will be an emblem of aristocratic privilege…the supreme token that the person possessing it belongs to the ruling class – that he is a member of that super-class who do not die, like dogs, after 10 years of active life.”
By Glenn O’Brien
